What did the Jewish scribes daily life entail outside of there faith?

Answer 1

A Jewish scribe, a sofer, is trained in writing legible square Hebrew and what is called STAM Hebrew (an acronym for the form of the Hebrew alphabet used in Sefrei (sacred books) Tefillin and Mezuzas.) A scribe must be ritually pure before writing God's name, so it is (and was) traditional for a scribe to dunk in a ritual bath (a mikvah) before writing. Contact with sacred text was also held to make one ritually impure, so a second ritual dunk may have been common after writing. (Not to mention the practical matter of getting rid of ink stains!)

Scribes also make (and in past ages, made) money from writing marriage contracts (ketubas) and divorce papers (gets), and one would imagine that in previous times, they earned money from writing commercial contracts. In pre-modern times, every scribe almost certainly also made his own ink from oak galls, copperas (iron sulfate), lamp black and gum arabic, and the scribe may well also have prepared parchment from calf, sheep and goat skin, stretching it flat, splitting thicker hides, shaving it to thickness and treating the surface for writing. Large Jewish communities may well have provided enough work for a scribe to do that job on a full-time basis, but we know that, for many, even today, being a scribe is a part-time job.

Because a scribe was intimately familiar with the texts of the books he copied, many scribes were considered scholars, and a significant number have (and had) rabbinic ordination. This meant that they could serve as Judges in rabbinic courts, which in ancient times handled all kinds of civil matters even in eras when other powers such as the Roman Empire or European kingdoms had control of criminal matters. In a list of 25 rabbis mentioned in the Talmud for whom their day jobs were identified, there were two scribes, along with carpenters, farmers, merchants and even day laborers.